← LA Opera Podcasts: Behind the Curtain
LA Opera Podcasts: Behind the Curtain
Stephen Fry on Falstaff: A LIVE Conversation with Maestro James Conlon
00:40:04
In this pre-recorded post-show talk Maestro James…
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- [00:09]
A
Welcome to behind the Curtain, L.A. opera's official podcast. Each week we dive deep into the creative process with the artists, creatives and scholars who bring opera to life. Get ready to decode the drama, dissect the music and hear the heart behind the high notes. From backstage laughs to history making moments, every opera starts with a story. In this pre recorded post show talk, maestro James Conlon sits down with actor and comedian Stephen Fry to explore Falstaff's roles across Shakespeare's plays, his wit and humanity, and why he remains one of the playwrights most enduring and beloved characters. Don't miss the final performances of this witty and lavish opera, Falstaff. Tickets are on sale now@laopera.org.
- [01:08]
B
Well, Stephen, we are thrilled and honored to have you with us. I'm not going to talk much, I'm going to ask Stephen and I've never known Stephen to be short on words and so he will be able to tell you a whole lot of things. Stephen, first of all, it's great to have you here, as it always is. He's given two talks on Oscar Wilde after, After the Dwarf and after Zalomeh and one on mythology because he's written two great books on two, right?
- [01:35]
C
Four actually.
- [01:35]
B
Well, actually I've only got two. I don't know what happened. I've got two of them, two of them at home on myth, on myths and Greek myths. And so any excuse we have to have him and he just happened to be coming to la, I said, well, Falstaff, Shakespeare, and come and have a great time with us.
- [01:52]
C
So thank you, Stephen, for such a pleasure, for doing this after that astounding performance by the entire cast, orchestra and the meister himself. But one thing has to be clear, that you. To talk about Falstaff, to talk about Shakespeare's Falstaff, to talk about Falstaff in the world, to talk about Falstaff in this astounding opera without being fun or at least trying not to be pompous would be a grave mistake. So if I do veer towards pomposity, just shout prick. As in, as in pricking the balloon of pomposity. Of course, that must be what I mean. But I wanted to say that, yes, Falstaff means a great deal to me. I think it should mean a great deal to all of us. The character should. And I, oddly enough, was asked to play him in Chicago and I would have started rehearsal roundabout now, but I'm not able to because I'm doing a television thing in Spain instead. But when Ed hall, the son of Sir Peter hall, the great Shakespearean director, asked if I would play it at Chicago. I kind of knew I couldn't, but I couldn't resist going back to the original source, which is, as you probably know, the two parts of Henry IV in which Falstaff first appears and then his death is mourned in Henry V and we see him reincarnated in the Merry Wives of Windsor. And James told you, if you were here, the story, which is adhered to by many, and I think the. The Italian phrase is si non e vero e ben trovato. If it's not true, it's well founded, and that is that Queen Elizabeth summoned Shakespeare and said to him in the way that royal people do, we so enjoyed that fat man in your play. And since then, you haven't included him in any of your new plays. He did die in Henry the Fifth. Well, I don't care. I want him back again. I tell you what would be fun, would be to see him in love. And that is the story behind the creation of the Merry Wives of Windsor. But we have to look much further back to think about Falstaff, I believe. I believe the reason Falstaff is one of the truly great characters in all fiction, in all one of the great creations of man, if you like, is because of his deep, deep meaning, particularly, I'll have to say, and you'll have to overlook me here, because it's kind of parti pris in a way, particularly if you have any Englishness in you, either culturally or in blood terms, if that means anything. I'm sort of English, but I'm mostly Jewish, in fact, But I considered myself. People call me quintessentially English. I'm also like Sir John Falstaff, as it happens, thanks to his Royal Majesty, a knight of the realm, you'd be pleased to know. But that. Oh, shush. No, really. Oh, go on, then. No, but I want to go back to this idea of England as a developing country developing very fast over the last thousand years and starting to accelerate around the time of Shakespeare. There'd been so many wars, so many wars for the throne. The War of the Roses finally settled matters towards the end when Henry, who became Henry vi, married Elizabeth Woodville of York. He was a Lancastrian, and the two Roses were combined because he was a Tudor as well, a Welsh family name, and it's called the Tudor Rose. And the Tudor dynasty then ruled with some peace. There weren't any civil wars until hundreds or so years later. Anyway, the point is that England began to develop very fast, as did Europe generally, with trade and with intellect. The age of reason hadn't quite begun. But thanks to characters like Bacon and other figures, it was beginning to be a time when the shackles of ecclesiasticism, if I can put it that way, the way that people were allowed to think was slowly opening up, very slowly. I mean, people were still executed for atheism, and atheism was a dirty word, so you couldn't be that free, but you could start to be free. And it was called the new learning. The new learning casts all in doubt was a phrase that John Donne used a little later. It sort of began in the 1590s, if you like, but accelerated. Its source was Italy and the Renaissance, and in England was completely cut in two about it, as humans are. And I think this is the point. It's a human division between what you could call a sort of Catholicism and a sort of Protestantism. And in England, it was a real Catholicism and a real Protestantism that had divided the country. And as you probably know, Henry viii, who was a tyrannical monomaniac who had a lot of wives, broke with the Pope. Now, that couldn't happen now, but it did happen and. It caused a bit of trouble because unfortunately, one of his daughters, Mary, was a loyal Catholic and she inherited the throne after the boy Edward had a very short reign and she started to burn Protestants at a considerable rate. And then when she died, her half sister Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Boleyn, came to the throne and she was a Protestant. And slowly things settled down and a kind of identity was formed. And the Protestantism was. Seemed like freedom from the terrible burnings of the Catholics, but it was very anti Catholic and the Catholics suffered enormously, mustn't get that wrong. But some sort of English identity was forged, which was to do with Protestantism. But Protestantism started to change. It started to become as extreme as Catholicism. And towards the end of Shakespeare's life, Puritanism began to be the major form of it, which was anti everything. And so somewhere there was a memory, and it's a trace memory that all cultures have throughout the world. And that is of a golden age. The Greeks had it, the ancient Greeks had the idea of a golden age, and the Chinese had it. And everyone has this idea that there was a time when things were fun and free and open and sweet and everybody liked each other, and that was the golden age. And with England, that was connected with the greenwood. The greenwood had enormous symbolic power. It goes back to Some of the earliest medieval literature, like Gawain and the Green Knight, Grey Nagoma, as it's properly called, in which this figure arrives, kind of made of greenery and challenges an Arthurian night. The Arthurian knights were Christian knights. Of course, it's a Christian allegory. The Arthurian story, the Holy Grail, after all, is Christ's cup. And the story of the Arthurian legend is to become as pure as possible in order to get the cup. But against the Christianity was this pagan greenwood. And the pagan greenwood had elves and goblins and it had fairies and it had a kind of magic to it. And it was beautiful and it was fun. And England was the England of the maypole and it was the England of beer and license and there was no puritanism and everyone was free and open. It never existed, of course it did, and golden ages never did. But the idea of them forges national identity and becomes the mythology of a country. It's who we feel we should be. And then this kind of got strangely ethnically re engineered into a kind of fondness for an idea of something Saxon being connected with the greenwood. The big legend that grew up around that, of course, was Robin Hood, who was supposedly the Saxon and Saxons are blond and blue eyed and they used the longbow and the ordinary bow and arrow and they wear green and they live in the wood and their enemy are French. They're Normans, they have lank black hair and they use crossbows instead of proper manly bows and arrows. And the England of hearts of oak and the longbow and Robin Hood and a rebellion against the French with their taxes and their laws. The Normans who had invaded in 1060, we built up this myth that they were the ones not to be trusted. And America has inherited this. Linguistically. You will find all the way through the earliest American literature a total distrust of Latinate words. You know, I don't like that. I like a good, you know, two cent word. I don't like them. Ten dollar words, you know, is a very American, forgive the terrible accent, is a thing a lot of Americans have always said. I always love that moment in the Importance of Being Earnest where Algernon kneels in front of Sicily and says, I hope I shall not offend you if I state quite openly and frankly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection. And of course you kind of gasp at the splendor of such a phrase, but it's preposterous. Nobody expresses love by saying, you are the Visible personification of absolute perfection. You say I love you. Those are Saxon words, Germanic words. I love you, you know not. You are the visible personification of absolute perfection. Those words we use for science and for law and for bureaucracy. But the honest words, the heart of oak words, are the English words which we consider to be the words of the Angles and the Saxons. In the same way that Robin Hood is our hero and Falstaff comes from this world. And Shakespeare is remarkable in that he combined these two things. One of the reasons, I think we can say with any real certainty, if you are a lover of Shakespeare, that he did write the plays assigned to him is that within them there is this split personality. A young person who grew up in the countryside, the Forest of Arden in Stratford. One of the few early stories of his childhood is how he was prosecuted for poaching a deer in the Forest of Arden outside Stratford. And Caroline Spurgeon, who wrote Shakespeare's image in the 30s and for most of us, settled the argument of the Nature of Shakespeare, pointed out that in his language, more than any contemporary or indeed any writer, since virtually apart from in the 20th century and possibly Thomas Hardy, there is more imagery of the countryside than in any other writer, that if he makes a comparison to something unlike Marlowe or any of the other writers of that time, if he was as black as, he would say, as black as a kite, as black as a bird, a crow, whereas always with the others it was as black as sticks or as black as, you know, a Nubian or something like that. It was always something more classical. But with him it's the countryside. Shakespeare was obsessed with the countryside, but he was also sophisticated. So when he first arrived in London, he wrote some plays, often thought of as his first plays. There's an argument about that. It might have been Love's Labour's Loss, but even that's a good example, because that's about people leaving the city and going to the country and finding the forest a place of healing and reconciliation and self improvement. Let fame that all hunt after in their lives disgrace us with the grace of death and live registered upon our brazen tombs. In other words, worldly fame we cast aside. We go into the forest that's Love's Labour's Lost. But then the next three plays he wrote were the first three parts of Henry vi. He wrote out of sequence, essentially, in English history, which is often called the Henriad. And people argue about how many plays are in the Henriad. It's not just the Henrys. You could say it's Henry iv, part one, part two, and then Henry V. And then you could add Henry viii, which he also wrote. But most people would say it starts with his plays about the wars of the Roses, which kind of kicked off by the death of Richard ii. And then you get the three parts of Henry VI and then, sorry, the two parts of Henry iv, then Henry V, then the three parts of Henry vi, then Henry viii. Don't bother about that. It's very, very boring. The point is they're rip roaring histories, they're very good fun. But when he started, they were just that. They were scenes of battles, people going on and off stage, and as was much mocked brilliantly by Jonathan and Miller, York, get thee to Winchester, Winchester to Gloucester, saucy Worcester, come thee hither and hence to Hampshire. And you know, all these dukes of Hampshire and Norfolk and so on, all going off and you never catch up with who's who and what battle and who's winning it. But by the time he started to write the Henry iv, something had changed. In Shakespeare there's a depth and he started to have more. He didn't have to show off about history. He, he could be the country boy and he included in the battles of Henry V. But in Henry IV too, which is full of civil war, he included this character, Falstaff. Falstaff, who belonged to the greenwood somehow. He was a fat, lazy, lecherous figure, but he had something of that quality about him, that Robin Hood quality, that he was nothing to do with bureaucracy or the military. He had roots in all kinds of theatrical traditions. Even in Shakespeare's time, there were such things as theatrical traditions. The braggadocio, the miles gloriosus, the soldier who boasts. He had a lot of that, but he had something new. He had the wit and the engagement with life that made you love him. You could not help it. However dishonest he was, however treacherous he was, you could look at a hero and find them black because there was something in this person, a grain, a love and attachment to life and a carelessness about life and insouciance, which is wholly admirable and we never dare have ourselves. And we also know that if we knew someone like that, we would want them to leave the house instantly. And yet we know they stand for something very important and very early on in Henry iv. And I've written this down so I can do it for you. He wrote the extraordinary speech, the honor speech, which is in the play, in the opera, of course, and I'll try and do it for you. I'LL try and sort of do it as a full stop. But if you remember, he talks about how honor can't mend your bones if you're fighting, because Bardolph and Pistol say to him, you have no honor. And he said, well, what's the point of honor? He says. Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honor hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honor? A word. What is in that word? Honor? What is that honour? Air. A trim reckoning. Who hath it? He that died of Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. Tis insensible, then. Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Therefore, I'll none of it. Honor is a mere scutcheon. And so ends my catechism. And that's one of the. That's very kind, but nobody in the English language, or as far as we could really, in Greek and Latin, nobody had ever spoken like that. And he spoke directly to the people in the yard, as it was called, the Groundlings, those who were standing up in the theater who couldn't afford the expensive seats. And they all knew someone like that, but they never knew someone who could say it for them like that. He speaks for an enormous section of. Not just of humanity, but of our individual humanity. Most of us have within us the knowledge that we are. We are full of appetite and zest and zeal and friendship and joy and fun and party, but that as we age, we have to put it away, we have to get rid of it. And Falstaff, astonishingly, doesn't. And he pays for it at the end, at the end of Henry iv, Part two, which was up there on the screen for us to see. I know thee not, old man, is what Henry V says to him. Henry V has been a royster with him as Prince Hal. He's parted with him in the pub, the Boar's Head, with Mistress Quickly, who's in that as well, and. But then his father dies and Hal does something extraordinary. Having been this wild boy, this prince, who's just had fun and, you know, disappointed, his father looked as if he would never make a king. And he looks at the man he called a friend and with whom he put his arms around. We have known the chimes at midnight. And he says, I know thee not, old man, and then proceeds to tear him to pieces, mocks him for his size. And it's a horrible moment. It's a moment in which Henry becomes A king. And it's admirable. He had to do it, and we know it. But it's also tragic. It's terrible. And it remains important because it holds us to this idea of who we are and what we sacrifice as we age and we take on responsibility and what civilization has done to the greenwood. The fact that somehow we feel we should still be that figure who can laugh and have fun and go round the Maypole and believe in fairies and elves and the magic and the transformative power of a wood, but we know the world won't let us do that. And Shakespeare was writing the end of the 16th century, the 1590s, when all this was, you know, when Elizabethans were. Had a sense of who they were, but knew they were losing it. And Elizabeth was aging and she would die eight years after the play. And a new king would come, James VI of Scotland, the first of England. And Shakespeare would continue to write, indeed, some of his greatest plays at that point. And he continued the theme in Twelfth Night, one of his other absolute masterpieces, which the Henry IVs were. And 12th Night, there's a kind of reinvention of Falstaff in the character of Toby Belch. And Toby Belch is again a figure of license and fun. And he's smack up against Malvolio, who is a symbol of order. And he's the steward of the house in every sense, a Puritan. And with that Italianate sort of. Even the name Malvolio, of course, as opposed to Belch, you couldn't get a more clear example. And then, wonderfully, you look at what Verdi did at the end of his century. His century had seen the same sorts of change that Shakespeare's had. And Shakespeare might have believed, as he lived on into the early part of the 17th century, he died in 1616, that maybe, you know, the world had settled, he'd gone to live back at Stratford. But of course, the 17th century would be even more disruptive, even more destructive of the idea of a greenwood of England. It saw our civil war and then the arrival of the Puritans in Cromwell, who banned Christmas, literally banned Christmas. And then the restoration of the monarchy. And a sort of jolly. We kind of tried to make Charles ii, We called him the Merry Monarch to remind us of merry England. And he brought back Christ. We could dress up and put holly around the trees and do green things again. But it was the most destructive century that there'd been. It was the Thirty Years War in Europe, which was, man on man, the worst war that had ever been fought. And the same thing. There's a great parallel with Verdi's century. Verdi, I'm sure, you know, he was born in 1813, same year as Richard Wagner, as it happens. And so was a young man at the time of the great revolutions of the 1840s. And the world seemed it was going to be turned upside down and everything was going kind of crazy. And his own country didn't exist. Italy was not a nation, but in his time it became one. And it was a symbol of the Risorgimento, the Garibaldi and his. They used the name Verdi. It's a wonderful strange thing that makes you believe this. If there is a sort of ruling deity who's making a joke with everybody. The idea was that there would be a united Italy under the king, who was called Vittorio Emmanuel, Victor Emmanuel, Vittorio Emanuel, King of Italy. And bizarrely, if you write up V E R D I Vittorio Emmanuel rei d' Italia, it spells Verdi. And Verdi, when he was a young man and he'd written Naboco and the. The chorus of the Hebrew slaves spoke to a lot of Italians as being a sign of revolution. And although, you know, Verdi obviously was a decent man, he was behind it. He wasn't really a revolutionary. I think it's fair to say you know far more about him than I do, James. But he was associated with the idea of Italy because of that. So he was a national composer and he saw that extraordinary century. But unlike so many artists and great composers we can think of, he lived this long life, as James mentioned in his talk. And so in his 80th year, he could look back. And unlike Shakespeare, when Shakespeare was asked to write the Merry Wives of Windsor, it was just a job, hack job for a queen that he clearly didn't really believe in. He made a fun farce and it is delightful. And I've seen Mary Wise of Windsor and it's often over insulted because it isn't his masterpiece in the way that Falstaff is Verdi's masterpiece. And certainly Falstaff is a greater work, but nonetheless it owes a great deal to not just the Falstaff of Henry iv, but the Falstaff of Merry Wives. And you can see somehow Verdi knowing that there was a sort of similar impulse in the century of his. He lived to see, obviously trains, but also telephones. And it looked as if the world was changing. And this Falstaff character, although English, fits terribly well into the commedia dell' arte tradition, of course, and into the idea of an Italian bouffo kind of figure, like a Big frog of licentiousness. And they exist in the Decameron, and, you know, they have done in Italian culture for as long as they have in the English. And he and Boito, his librettist, managed to extract all that juice out of Falstaff into music. And he kept the best parts of Falstaff and lost the slightly more complicated subplots of Merry Wives of Windsor and created this unbelievable, unbelievable piece that we've just seen, which is so joyful and so fast and so brilliant, it skims along. And unquestionably, you see the character of Falstaff as slightly sad at first because he's made fun of. But he stands up and he holds up his drink and he starts that fugue at the end. The world is a joke. The world is funny. And what's wonderful is everybody sings it. Unlike in the merry, wise Windsor, where Falstaff is, as it were, kicked out. Everybody says, yes, it's okay. We join in because comedy at its best is unquestionably the great art form, I think, because it embraces every aspect of what it is to be human. And by that I'll say, if you look at Otello, which was the work that Verdi wrote before, you know, his penultimate opera, before he had a 6, 7, 8, 9 year gap and then wrote and then wrote Falstaff, Otello should be a comedy. All art should be a comedy. If human beings weren't so solipsistic, narcissistic, monomaniac as to think the world revolves around them as individuals. And that is the tragedy of tragedy, is that the tragic hero is placed in a world where he thinks it's gone wrong. I can't live in this world. I'm too honorable. I'm too intelligent. If I'm Hamlet, I'm too emotionally wrapped up in what is right and what is good. I will not compromise. I will die rather than live in this world. Whereas a comedy looks at the tragic hero and says, you're not a tragic hero, you're one of us. And they put their arm around them and there's a marriage and there's a reconciliation, And Othello is terrifying because it should be a comedy. It has vast plot. Someone whispers, your wife's deceiving you. Just like the merry wives of Windsor. They're dropped handkerchief with embroidery on them and say, oh. And in a proper farce, Othello would, you know. But what happens in Othello is that Othello shouts, blood, blood, blood. And strangles his wife. And it's as if that happened in the middle of a farce comedy, it's terrifying. And, you know, that's why the power of these tragedies is that they're skewed and they're wrong. They tell us something awful about ourselves and they're very important for that reason. But a comedy suggests tragedy. And in almost every comedy, the comic hero could do what Othello does. You know, Ford could murder his wife. That's essentially what would happen. He would murder Alice. And in the same way as you like it in the other comedies, in Twelfth Night, the fury of jealousy, which is a huge motif for Shakespeare, and in the Merry Wise of Windsor, even in that, Ford's jealousy is much more scary and pathological than it is in the opera. And then of course, he puts it all together in his mysterious last plays like Winter's Tale, where the jealousy of Leontes is a horrifying thing, but instead of it ending, he is embraced into the world through a sort of magical act, and his wife Hermia brings him back. So there is this constant sense in all art, I think, which is the question, what is it to be human? And the recognition that to be human is to be part intellect, part instinct, part impulse, as Nietzsche put it. Part Apollo, part Dionysus, part frenzied creature of appetite and. And part person of Apollonian harmony. Reason, numbers, rules. And so do we live a rules ordered, bureaucratic, or at least in some way laid down hierarchical society? Or do we live in the freedom of our impulses where we can't do both? We know we can't. And we know that our life is a compromise. And the compromise is sorted out in comedy with marriage and family and society smiling and forgiving and, you know, overlooking. And it gives us joy, it makes us smile. It always makes me cry more than tragedies make me cry. And tragedies do the other thing. They say, no, it's impossible. The world can't be lived in. And in the 20th century, theater and opera tended to move towards existential absurdism, which is kind of what Verdi is telling us to do. He's saying the world is a joke. But unfortunately, in the kind of 1950s, the joke. Although I'm a huge admirer of Beckett, it's a far more serious. It's much more up itself as absurdism. You know, it's still a kind of tragic hero railing, you know, like Camus, hero in, you know, you could murder someone, you could. The world is so wrong and so absurd. But Falstaff is saying the world is so Absurd. Let's party. Not let's kill ourselves. And I think most of us would believe that that is the best future for mankind. So when we go to see an opera like Falstaff, well, there is no opera like it. But when we go and see Falstaff, the wood at the end, there is a greenwood there and Herne the hunter and the horns of the cuckold, the put on the cuckolder and there are fairies and there's a Midsummer Night's Dream kind of magic to it. And it's like bottom waking up at the end of Midsummer Night's Dream with his asses ears. The horns are taken off instead of the asses ears. What a fool I've been. But what a fool we all are. We are all fools and we are all fools. And unless we know it, we become more foolish. And it's a gift. And the healing healing of that play, the healing feeling of the greenwood is an ancient tradition, but put in modern clothes by a genius like Verdi and remains one of the ornaments of our culture. And I want to thank Maestro for making such a great, great performance out of it.
- [33:07]
B
You will have noticed that I didn't even ask him anything. Sorry, so sorry. It was 35 minutes all in one go. Stephen, there's nobody like you.
- [33:16]
C
Oh, he's a joke.
- [33:18]
B
And of course he can do this on, I mean hundreds of subjects at the drop of a hat. I've witnessed it and it's one of the great, it's one of the great joys. In fact I think I told you and you weren't with me at the moment when I told you. But you could blush. I mean, I now put him on YouTube to cheer me up after I've seen the evening.
- [33:39]
C
Oh, that's so good. But listen, we might take some questions. People haven't. But I. But before, in case James tries to escape and you were here at this pre show talk or have been to others of his pre show talks. It is a remarkable thing when nature stroke God gives a human being the gift of music. As someone without it, I. There's nothing I admire more. And I can just tell you a story to prove that I don't have the gift of music. By the way, because it is actually official, I can't sing because some people say you've got quite a pleasant voice. Even you should be in the opera. Do you sing? And I say no, not only don't I sing, but I can prove that I don't sing. And I don't have to try to Sing in order to prove it. I was at a funeral, my friend, the film director John Schlesinger, many years ago, and he was at the synagogue in North London opposite Lord's Cricket Ground. And it's the Liberal Reform Synagogue and there are lots of people there. He put on a paper, you know, kipper. And I found myself sitting next to, in the pews, Paul McCartney. And I thought, oh God, so I'll do what I normally do. When the songs happened and there was a song sheet and there were things to sing, I mimed. I mimed excellently, I like to think, but it was miming. And after the second one, Paul turned to me, said, stephen, you're not singing. Singing. Why aren't you singing? You should be singing. And I said, I said, paul, I don't, I don't sing. I can't sing. Everybody can sing. Sing. So the third one came up and I started to sing and he nudged me. He said, no, you're right, you can't sing.
- [35:12]
B
Shut up.
- [35:15]
C
So if Paul McCartney tells you you can't sing, you can't sing. But anyway, as I say, I don't have the gift of music. So like everybody without it, who loves music, I am fascinated by it. I meet someone like James and I sort of look around the back of their head to see if there's an extra bit there where all this, I mean, when you know what it. If you know enough about music to know what a musician like James does when they're looking at a score, when they're talking to an orchestra, when they're preparing and learning things. It is mind boggling that the human brain can do such astonishing things. Absolutely amazing. So that they should have that gift, but also have the gift of communication that James has the ability to enthuse and to spread the word of the music he loves so well. And the energy and commitment to do it is unique. I've never met anyone who contains that. And I think Los Angeles owes him so much. Sorry Drew embarrass you.
- [36:25]
B
Thank you for coming all that way to say this, but I've had, I've had a great run here. As you know, it's 20 years and it's changing form now, but, but I think one of the things that I have, I have never been able to have a series of pre performance talks anywhere in the world until I came to Los Angeles. And I am so grateful that, that you as a, as a public have welcomed that and made it possible and made me, gave, inspired me. People say, well, how do you do it?
- [36:56]
C
How do you do it?
- [36:57]
B
I mean, I just really love doing it. And I love doing it because I see you loving it. And my feeling is, you know, everybody really does want to have a sense of context. It's not, you know, not everybody can be educated in music, as Stephen is saying, and also in classical music. And there's a great fear of classical music. It's for snobs, it's for an elite, it's for those that are better. And I say, look, you should have seen me running around the streets of New York City on the subways when I was a kid. There's nothing elite about me. And yet you can fall in love with classical music and you can fall in love with opera, and it can sustain you all your life, which it has sustained me until this very, very day. And I've never experienced it. I have experienced it in many ways over my life, but never in the very special way I have here in Los Angeles. And very specifically through the pre performance talks, which you have supported for such a long time. Just by being there, just by soaking it up. And sometimes I can never fit into 45 minutes, what I want to say, 45 minutes. It's been a great experience for me. And of course, I'm with a real professional here. Sitting here on this stage with Stephen is a humbling experience, as it always is. Stephen, we're thrilled to have you here. And we met over 20 years ago while we were making a film of the Magic Flute. Ken Branagh produced and directed, and Stephen had done the translation into English. And I didn't tell you at the time, Stephen, but I'll tell you now, I hate opera. In translation, there's almost nothing I dislike more than operant translation. And yet his translation of the Magic Flute was so amazing, so beautiful, so funny, so touching and incredibly clever. I thought to myself, you know, this is the only time I have really loved a translation. And we befriended ourselves there at a recording session of the Magic Flute in London 2005. I think if my memory. Seriously, Craig. Well, Stephen, I propose you and I find another occasion to talk.
- [39:13]
C
Yeah, we should do.
- [39:14]
B
Thank you very much for being with us, David.
- [39:16]
C
You're right. Thank you all.
- [39:21]
A
Don't miss the final performances of this witty and lavish opera, Falstaff. Tickets are on sale now@laopera.org don't forget to like, comment and subscribe to behind the Curtain wherever you listen to podcasts and share this episode with your friends on your favorite social media. Did you know that as a nonprofit LA Opera relies on charitable donations from arts lovers just like you. Learn more about how your support brings our stage to life@laopera.org donate we can't wait to see you at the opera.